Did you know Lance Henriksen is part of the cast of The Strain? Yes, when the show begins this Sunday night on FX you won’t be seeing the veteran genre actor who has starred in films like Aliens, Pumpkinhead and the upcoming Harbinger Down, but you will certainly hear him.Similar to the work he contributed to the When a Stranger Calls remake and various video games and cartoons, he’s lending his recognizable vocal talents to Guillermo del Toro’s horror series.

The series doesn’t even appear on the actor’s IMDb page, strangely enough. But he is a participant and I had a chance to ask Del Toro about Henriksen’s vocal contributions as “The Master” (the show’s big bad).

“The thing that we know is that The Master, the character, is he encompasses many voices. So, he’s a character made of many voices over the centuries,” Del Toro said. “He overtakes bodies and he stays alive that way. We wanted to meld several voices, and one of the voices that we wanted to use was Lance, because of its power and authority and the way it sounds, and then mix it with other voices as the base for The Master’s voice, for the authority and the power it has.”

While I had Del Toro’s attention, I had to ask about the show’s vampire design and his intentions with their looksince he has tread through vampire territory before.

“In terms of creature creation we really went into it trying to, little by little, reveal the biological traits and the design traits of these creatures to make sense to an audience,” he said, “not just from a looking terrifying, looking good point of view, but to make them feel organic. T make them feel like almost a different breed in the evolutionary history of this planet. You get to see them as a species, in a way, the more you advance in the plot and in this series. So, designing it took approximately six months of just purely conceptual and sculpture and draftsmanship design, and executing it took a very long, long time. But it was as complex and as demanding as designing creatures for a feature film.”

The Strain premieres Sunday, July 13th on FX – check your local listings for times.